New Britain Community Turns To Students For Tax Help

NEW BRITAIN - — When Josh Rivera, 17, walks the halls of New Britain high school with his football teammates, they aren't just talking about practice. This season, they're talking tax returns.

"I have a lot of my teammates come up and ask if their older brothers can come see me to help them with their tax returns," Rivera said. "It's a close community here in New Britain, we're all helping each other out."

Rivera is one of 17 Academy of Finance students at New Britain High School who is IRS certified to help residents with households incomes of $50,000 or less file their tax returns free of charge.

The students have completed close to 125 tax returns and brought over $180,000 in refunds back to the community, said New Britain High's Academy of Finance Director Sondra Sanford.

The Academy of Finance, one of four specialized, technical programs within the high school, partnered with the IRS in January to take part in VITA – a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program -- managed through community partnerships. After two Saturdays of VITA training in January, Academy of Finance students had to pass an IRS certification test to become basic tax preparers.

From there, the students were required to work 20 additional hours at one of three community partner sites, including New Britain's Human Resource Agency on Arch Street, assisting low income residents with their tax returns.

Sandra Lopez, a junior, knew she wanted to study finance the first day she set foot on New Britain's campus freshman year. Lopez says were it not for the Academy of Finance program, she would not have a basic tax preparing certification.

"Coming out of high school, already knowing about accounting and being certified to do certain taxes – this puts us above most other students applying to college," Lopez said.

" If [colleges or employers] see that we are already doing things with our certification, and that we know about finance, they might pick us over others."

Lopez and Rivera, joined by his twin brother and teammate, Luis, noted that most of the Academy students exceed their required service hours voluntarily.

"We go at 9 am on Saturday mornings. Even though it's the weekend, and you kind of want a break, we really don't mind. It's a welcoming community and you want to be there – even when you don't have to be," Lopez said.

The students also explained they feel as though the community embraced their work this spring – some even seeking out the high school tax prepares for their services over paid professionals.

"One time, we had someone call the Arch Street site and ask that Sandra Lopez from New Britain High help them with their tax returns. It was like a special request," Lopez said.

Sanford says although the Academy has several major components, work-based learning is their biggest focus with students. New Britain High School's focus on real world application and "career-readiness" reflects a trending national conversation among parents, educators and policy makers: does our education system prepare students for the work force?

"They have to do 20 hours of work, in addition to the training, using their skills. Use it or lose it, as we like to call it," referring to the application of classroom learned skills in accounting to the real world. "Going out and doing 20 more hours in the community reinforces the skills and tools we're teaching them. We want them to retain what they're learning"

Karolina Osowiecka, a 16-year-old sophomore from Poland, points out that she not only brings her accounting schools to the tax filing sites, but her bilingual ones as well.

"I speak Polish and my friend speaks Spanish, and we both find that we're speaking these languages when it comes to helping people here with taxes," she said. "This community is very unique."

But Sanford declined to take credit for the school's program, calling the New Britain's work with VITA "a complete community effort."

"We could absolutely not have done this alone," Sanford said. "Our partnership with the Human Resources Agency made this completely possible. And the community has been absolutely receptive to the project." "could not have been done alone, it was a complete community effort," she noted.

With just days before taxes must be filed in Connecticut and across the country, Sanford and the New Britain High students assure that the phones at the Academy are still ringing for help in the service centers.